The people’s chatbot

TL;DR: Washington is converging on the idea that it needs to be doing something about AI, with President Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman landing on a rare consensus: The public should own a piece of AI companies. It’s all unfolding as Anthropic and OpenAI’s potential IPOs loom.

What happened: There’s a lot going on, so here’s a breakdown of the moving pieces:

• Altman reportedly first floated the idea of a possible government stake in OpenAI to the Trump administration last year.
• Last Monday, Sanders announced his proposed bill that would give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest US AI companies.
• On Wednesday, Altman requested a meeting with Sanders, during which he reportedly told the politician that he couldn’t support the 50% threshold but would work with him to advocate for the general idea.
• On Friday, Trump also addressed the idea and his ongoing talks with OpenAI: “There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner.”

IPO irony: Talk of public ownership comes just as AI juggernauts Anthropic and OpenAI gear up for their potential public offerings (Anthropic confidentially filed for one on June 1). But just three days after pitching Wall Street, Anthropic called for a global slowdown on AI development. “We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development” to keep up with the advancement of AI, the company wrote in a blogpost.

The governance gap: Trump and Sanders’ public ownership pitches land as concerns about AI mount across the country. A bipartisan House draft bill unveiled Thursday would introduce a federal regulatory framework that would require top AI developers to address catastrophic risks posed by their advanced models, but the bill has drawn backlash over its preemption of state laws like those passed in California, New York, and Illinois.

Senate Democrats have also introduced a slew of proposals aimed at the Pentagon’s use of AI—most recently, Sen. Adam Schiff proposed a bill that would require a human to be involved when the Pentagon uses AI in weapons, alongside protections against uses for domestic surveillance.

Bottom line: Everyone from the White House to Congress to tech CEOs themselves seems to agree that AI is too big to leave alone. The question is what the intervention looks like and whether the public gets a slice of the ownership pie. —LC

—

Correction: In our Download on Friday, June 5, we stated that John Ternus will be Apple's third-ever CEO. We have updated the story to reflect that he will be the eighth. We apologize for the error. Any John Sculley erasure was unintentional.